Schizophrenia afflicts approximately one percent of the world's population, making it the most common
psychosis. Schizophrenia is characterized by positive and negative symptoms. Fundamental symptoms include thought disturbance, withdrawal, and difficulties managing effect. Secondary
symptoms include perception disorders such as hallucinations and grandiosity. Symptoms may also be non-schizophrenic
in nature, including anxiety, depression, and psychosomatic symptoms.

If a
movie star was to say cancer treatment has no scientific basis and hurts people, everyone would be outraged. We should be similarly outraged by Mr. Cruise. Every time we pick out psychiatry to discredit, we are really
hearkening back to the dark ages and before. We all need to be more scientific and more up to date. There are many sources
for good information, including our own National Institutes of Health, universities from coast to coast, advocacy associations
composed of people with mental illness and their family members -- all of whom have credentials. It is a terrible disservice
for a person without such credentials to Rant and Raveand to tell other people to stop taking their medicine.

Tom Cruise
is misguided when it comes to health and medicine. Psychiatry is no more a pseudoscience than acting is a pseudo-profession.
It's possible that living his entire adult life in the business of make-believe has led Tom Cruise to pretend that he knows
more than he actually does. Psychiatrists, just like all other medical specialists, do save lives.

“…Tom Cruisealso stood by his earlier criticism of actress Brooke Shields for using medication to treat her postpartum depression, suggesting
that she should have relied instead on vitamins and exercise.” (June 2005)

Mr. Cruise, I do have a bit of knowledge and experience with nutrition, vitamins and exercise
in relation to mental illness…my other grandfather was…

The first
course of action taken in the treatment of my brother’s illness was a combination of vitamin therapy and psychiatric
care. When his illness escalated into a series of violent and ”life-threatening” situations, psychotropic medication (Haldol) was finally administered.Although
it is not a cure, the medication does work.

In the past 25 years I have known many,
many psychiatrists, but there was one doctor who had the best description of how psychotropic medications (i.e., Haldol, Thorazine,
Navane, Prolixin, etc…) work on a schizophrenic mind. He explained it in the form of an analogy.I met him during the beginning stages of my brother’s illness…

Picture a small transistor radio inside
the head of a schizophrenic, or for that matter, imagine a radio inside your own head.Now imagine that radio is turned on full volume to some talk radio station where all you hear 24 hours a day,
7 days a week are voices.The medication cannot turn that radio off, but it can
lower the volume on the radio so that the only voice heard is that of your own.

His life
story and his extraordinary work with his patient, Mary
Barnes.

“Laing was invited by some doctors to examine a young girl diagnosed as schizophrenic. The girl was locked into a padded cell in a special
hospital, and sat there
naked. She usually spent
the whole day rocking to and fro. The doctors asked Laing for his opinion. What would he do about her? Unexpectedly, Laing stripped off naked himself and entered her cell.

There he sat with her, rocking in time to her rhythm.

After about twenty minutes she started speaking,

something she had not done for several months.

The doctors were amazed. 'Did it never occur to you to do that?'

Laing commented to them later, with feigned innocence.”

Laing remains a highly enigmatic figure. His work tends to be dismissed by most psychiatrists;
however, droves of mentally ill people insist that this was a man who truly understood how they felt. Laing did not appear
to so much preach a doctrine as live it. His self-destructive tendencies and mood swings are well documented. In 1989, he
died of a heart attack at the age of 62, his health ruined by years of depression and alcoholism.

"Overall, physicians are more than twice as
likely as the general population to kill themselves."